Debates and provocations
Debates and provocations chairs
Amany Elbanna
University of Sussex
Tamara Roth
University of Arkansas
Important dates
Proposal submission deadline: 14 March 2027
Notification of acceptance: 28 March 2027
Debates and provocations description
ECIS Debates and Provocations offer a dedicated space for the Information Systems community to engage in critical reflection, challenge entrenched assumptions, and imagine alternative futures for research and practice. In a rapidly evolving digital world, our field confronts profound questions about the ethics and societal impact of generative AI, the future of work and organising, the role of IS scholarship in addressing global crises, and the very methods by which we produce and evaluate knowledge.
Designed in the spirit of intellectual openness that defines ECIS, Debates and Provocations foster constructive yet daring conversations that disrupt comfort zones, stretch boundaries, and broaden our collective imagination. This track is open to all scholars at all career levels, working across all genres and methodological traditions.
We invite submissions that inspire fresh thinking, question dominant paradigms, or advance provocative ideas capable of sparking lively dialogue across the ECIS community.
Format of debate and provocation proposals
Debate and Provocation proposals must not exceed six single-spaced pages and must conform to the ECIS paper submission template. The page limit is all-inclusive and covers the title, body of the paper, figures and tables, and references.
- Debate is a dialectical format in which 2-3 presenter argue for opposing viewpoints on a specific topic or issue. Through structured argumentation, participants aim to persuade both the audience and each other of the validity of their positions.
- Provocation is a generative pitch designed to challenge conventional thinking and stimulate new ways of seeing. It seeks to push boundaries, disrupt the status quo, and open space for fresh imagination.
We invite free-form submissions that address the following:
- the key topic or issue at stake and the positions adopted;
- the organisation and delivery of arguments during the debate or provocation pitch;
- the strategy for audience engagement (e.g., live polling, interactive Q&A, or other participatory methods).
We expect a Debate to last 45 minutes and a Provocation Pitch to last 30 minutes, inclusive of all presentation and interaction time.
Suggested themes and provocative questions
To inspire potential submissions, we offer the following provocative questions and thematic directions. These are only illustrative, not prescriptive. Submissions may engage with one or more of these themes or advance entirely new lines of inquiry.
- Has “being human” become a design problem? In an era of algorithmic governance, predictive profiling, and behavioural nudging, are we engineering new forms of subjectivity or eroding the conditions for human dignity, autonomy, and flourishing?
- Does hyper-personalisation deliver freedom or a deceptive individuation that erases others?
- Should we abandon the aspiration for AI to “augment” humans and instead theorise AI as an ontological other with fundamentally different capacities, limits, and moral status?
- If generative AI displaces core human skills (writing, reasoning, designing), does human-centred AI have the conceptual resources to recognise and resist such displacement or is it complicit in it?
- Can IS scholarship move beyond ‘ethical AI’ checklists toward a dignity-centred account of algorithmic systems to demand proportionality, contestability and accountable oversight?
- Is generative AI the ultimate collaborator or the end of scholarly originality as we know it? What happens to authorship, integrity, and creativity when texts, code, and insights are co-produced with machines?
- Are we training a generation of scholars to outsource thinking to models they cannot inspect, audit, or hold accountable?
- Who owns the data that trains our AI systems, and whose labour is rendered invisible in the name of efficiency, scale, and autonomy?
- Should IS journals rethink the notion of contribution and impact to embrace pluralism and creative productions. If so, who gets to define them – academics, institutions, industry partners, or the public?
- Has digital transformation in higher education fundamentally changed what and how we teach in IS, or have we merely digitised outdated pedagogies? How can assessment reflect the collaborative, generative, and AI-augmented nature of learning today without collapsing into surveillance, gamification, or performative compliance?
